Weblin.io wants to help to reclaim the public nature of the internet! For that we are planning a funding application for the NGI Zero Commons Fund. In the next step we want to achieve Web scale. We aim to be able to handle one million users practically with an architecture that can handle billions in theory. There are many features planned or envisioned beyond this project to achieve Web scale. **1. Technical tasks:** - Prepare the backend for heavy load. Using the open source project Orleans is already a good foundation. We will run benchmarks and load tests checking the system with more than the current 6 load balanced instances to make sure that it holds in practice, not just in theory. - Move the backend storage from a single cloud provider to a high-availability multi-provider/multi-region solution. - Analyze the transport protocol with respect to scalability and potentially replace it with a technology appropriate for Web scale. The underlying chat protocol is XMPP because it is open source and open source servers are available. Using XMPP was a quick win. Now we have to check if it is appropriate for potentially billions of users in a decentralized network. It might well be. **2. User oriented features:** - Fine tune and enhance some features based on user feedback, for example the text chat needs the features people are used to. Users expect to transfer images and files, not just plain text. That’s not a big change, but it avoids disappointing the first impression. - Develop features that cope with many users in individual rooms, particularly on large web sites. There are already provisions to split rooms and manage layers, but we will have to deal with overflow situations to avoid congestion. - Add features that allow users to deal with many peers, because there will be issues once there are many users. For example, people will want to organize their friends. In the meantime, we are working on generating new users for the prototype in order to obtain feedback on existing functions and options. We would like to use communities as leverage and offer them a free tool for their communication, e.g. on their own website. We are of course happy to receive support and recommendations. If you are part of a community yourself, please do not hesitate to contact us with any questions or ideas.
